I differ with Newsbuster and Maddow. The S and P most certainly is pointing fingers at our leader’s inability to cooperate. This does not mean the S and P is right about that analysis. Trust me… I’m not biased… these are the words I see… and I don’t particularly like Maddow… though she is showing once again that even though I don’t like her politics or her snide attitude, she is a very effective debator and certainly is denying a correlative to skew the truth. The denied correlative is that the S and P is full of SH*T!

Here is what Newsbuster quotes from the S&amp;amp;P:· We have lowered our long-term sovereign credit rating on the United States of America to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA’ and affirmed the ‘A-1+’ short-term rating.· We have also removed both the short- and long-term ratings from CreditWatch negative.· The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.· More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.· Since then, we have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the Administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government’s debt dynamics any time soon.· The outlook on the long-term rating is negative. We could lower the long-term rating to ‘AA’ within the next two years if we see that less reduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or new fiscal pressures during the period result in a higher general government debt trajectory than we currently assume in our base case.

Michael McConnell, a leading First Amendment scholar (who is now at Stanford) and former Tenth Circuit judge (2002–2009), praises Larry Tribe’s stand on the constitutionality of the debt ceiling (see, for instance, this guest post). An excerpt from Prof. McConnell’s post at Advancing a Free Society:A week ago Washington was abuzz with the seemingly nifty idea that Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment could empower the President to borrow money above the debt ceiling, without congressional authorization. Now the idea seems to be dead. Not only has Secretary Geithner’s lawyer repudiated the suggestion, but the Secretary has denied he ever even floated the idea.Part of the reason this idea lost favor is that it was wrong on the merits. But it helped – maybe even decisively – that Professor Laurence Tribe, professor at Harvard Law School and well-known Obama enthusiast, stood up and publicly denounced the faulty constitutional interpretation on which it rested, in an op-ed in the New York Times.Professor Tribe deserves praise for this. It is not easy for a prominent intellectual to pull the rug out from under a political scheme of his allies, especially in a high-stakes partisan confrontation like the debt ceiling talks in Washington, where the Administration would dearly love to neutralize the leverage the debt ceiling gives Congress to force budgetary reform. This is what distinguishes a scholar from a hack: the willingness to analyze a question dispassionately and tell the truth even when it is politically inconvenient. via volokh.comif (WIDGETBOX) WIDGETBOX.renderWidget(‘d9f1befa-40d5-4a45-9fbc-88cc0c436176’);